Service Provider Featured Article

The hype surrounding innovations in the cloud has drawn a number of companies to consider migration. The attraction is enjoying the variety of benefits afforded in subscription-based pricing models, easy access to advanced capabilities and the elimination of costly updates and system maintenance. For others, however, fears still remain regarding performance, security, ease-of-use and actual costs. To examine how these fears have affected adoption, Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) researchers took a closer look.

A recent press release, In-Country Cloud Research Results, summarizes the Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) findings from their survey of nearly 4,000 IT decision makers in seven different countries, including the U.K., U.S., India, France, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The study shed light on the weakness of today’s public cloud and the opportunity that exists for service providers (SPs) to extend to the cloud services market and capture a significant portion of cloud-based value-added revenues by providing the same guaranteed SLAs (Service Level Agreements) routinely offered with business services. The primary concerns acting as inhibitors to the adoption of cloud services by enterprises throughout the global market tend to center on:

Response time

Stability

End-to-end availability

For decision makers, the most important element in cloud services needing improvement is performance. The global cloud services market is at stake in the process as it is expected to grow to a staggering $177 billion by 2015.

Cloud services, according to the study, are being rapidly adopted by major enterprises across an array of market sectors. Still, weaknesses exist within the public cloud services. At the top of these weaknesses are the risks associated with availability and quality of service. These shortcomings are causing a gap in the availability and use of cloud services. In fact, according to study, two thirds of IT decision makers are not relying on the cloud for essential business applications as they fear service outages.

The study also revealed that 46 percent of participates refer to current system delays in cloud service as unacceptable. Likewise, one in four has complained that no simple resolution path exists when SLAs are not met. And, two out of five IT decision makers have already experienced either frequent or lengthy outages in service. Still, 44 percent are optimistic that weaknesses in the carrier cloud will be resolved and have built expansions into the cloudI as part of their strategies for the next three years.

Dor Skuler (News - Alert), Alcatel-Lucent Vice President of Cloud Solutions, stated that, “Not all clouds are created equal.” For example, a typical large enterprise supports between 250 and 750 IT applications, so before it decides to move them to the cloud it must be confident of a smooth migration. It needs to ensure that there are substantial efficiencies to be gained, risks to its operations are minimal, and it is easy to use and that that cloud performance is guaranteed with service level agreements.

“Communications service providers can meet those expectations. By orchestrating and optimizing the assets within their networks and the network itself, they can meet the stringent cloud service delivery demands of consumers and businesses,” added Skuler.

The demand for cloud services is not expected to wane as these cloud research results reveal that IT decision makers are willing to pay for a cloud solution that is not only next-generation, but also delivers high performance. In fact, carrier cloud services are four times more attractive, bringing the potential to generate 10 times more revenue. To fully capitalize on these opportunities, however, service provides must be able to overcome fears and performance perceptions to deliver on true expectations.